If you’ve browsed Wikipedia for any length of time, you’re certainly familiar by now with the site’s periodic donation drives. In order to cover hosting and bandwidth costs without slathering every page in advertisements, the Wikimedia Foundation asks that its users donate as little as $3 to help the site continue to bring to the world its extensive knowledge of the minutiae of anime plots and lightsaber combat. As the site manages massive amounts of traffic, these drives are fairly frequent now, leading to what very well could be the mating call of the bitcoiner:

“Wikipedia should accept donations in Bitcoin!”

Every time a donation drive starts up, bitcoiners, especially those on reddit, drive themselves into a frenzy, pestering the website’s beleaguered administrative team via email and other messages, hounding them to take Bitcoin instead of things like credit cards or PayPal. This is rebuffed every single time with what has become a form letter:

Thanks for your email and for your interest in supporting free knowledge. Unfortunately we do not accept bitcoin, however, we are aware of bitcoin and we will continue to monitor it with interest. For a full list of other donation options, please visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en. Thank you again for your interest!

For anyone who’s worked with the public, especially a segment of the public that is convinced that terrible ideas are in fact good, this is a pretty standard brush-off, meant to fool the recipient into thinking someone cares about their stupid ideas and that they may even be implemented some time in the near future. The reality is that nobody will do anything remotely close to something like “accepting Bitcoin,” “adding the requested feature” to software, or letting your WoW character have every spell in the game. It’s a meaningless message, meant to placate and nothing more.

Regardless, bitcoiners see this as a promise as well as a challenge, and often their subreddit is inundated with posts about Wikipedia as a result. Since they’re so intent on having Wikipedia take their funny money, we looked a little further into the situation.

So far every drive has been successful, and recent donation amounts totaled over $15 million, and according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the average donation was approximately $22. So, if Wikipedia were to directly accept Bitcoin donations, how much more would they stand to earn? As it turns out, not much at all.

In a ridiculously informal and totally unscientific poll, I discovered that the same bitcoiners clamoring for Wikipedia to take their money don’t want to give them much money at all, if anything. Answers ranged from the equivalent of a couple of dollars, with at least two people regurgitating South Park’s “tree fiddy” meme, one stipulating that Wikipedia could have ten entire bitcoins if they “apologize for being wankers about the whole thing,” and many more insisted that Wikipedia no longer deserves their “money” for giving them the cold shoulder for so long. The combined amount from people willing to answer my question comes up to about $23.01. áIt took six people’s “generosity” to equal that of one average Wikipedian donator. Most of them wouldn’t donate at all; it’s all just grandstanding to proselytize for their cult.

That doesn’t stop them from sounding like a broken record every few months though:

Some, however, aren’t happy with Wikipedia itself, rather than their choices and ideology.

Oh don’t worry, I even lost my sysop powers because I hadn’t edited since March or something.

Btw nice blog <3

Mr Happy
December 16, 2013 @
5:28 pm

Wasn’t there some online game that finally caved and added bitcoins to their transaction services and amounted to roughly 10 bitcoins being transacted? Plus “[insert wellknown website that wants money here] should accept bitcoin for donations!” seems to be pretty antithetical to the bitcoin mindset, or atleast that of the true believers.